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The Blob and El Nino
A little over a year ago Nick Bond, a climate scientist at the Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Ocean [washington.edu] said, "In the fall of 2013 and early 2014 we started to notice a big, almost circular mass of water that just didn't cool off as much as it usually did, so by spring of 2014 it was warmer than we had ever seen it for that time of year."
Bond coined the term "The Blob" to refer to it.
Now new research indicates that the The Blob and El Nino together strongly depressed productivity off the West Coast, with The Blob creating most of the impact. From an article at phys.org [phys.org]:
The research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters by scientists from NOAA Fisheries, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and University of California, Santa Cruz is among the first to assess the marine effects of the 2015-2016 El Nino off the West Coast of the United States.
"Last year there was a lot of speculation about the consequences of 'The Blob' and El Nino battling it out off the U.S. West Coast," said lead author Michael Jacox, of UC Santa Cruz and NOAA Fisheries' Southwest Fisheries Science Center. "We found that off California El Nino turned out to be much weaker than expected, The Blob continued to be a dominant force, and the two of them together had strongly negative impacts on marine productivity."
"Now, both The Blob and El Nino are on their way out, but in their wake lies a heavily disrupted ecosystem," Jacox said.
[...]
The research paper describes real-time monitoring of the California Current Ecosystem with the latest technology, including autonomous gliders that track undersea conditions along the West Coast. "This work reflects technological advances that now let us rapidly assess the effects of major climate disruptions and project their impacts on the ecosystem," Jacox said.
Not to be confused with the movie [denofgeek.com] of the same name...
